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97% of people have at least one ‘workplace fatigue risk factor’.
This finding is from the U.S. National Safety Council, which defines workplace fatigue risk factors as things like:
- Not getting adequate sleep
- Working too much
- Not taking breaks
This confirms what we all know to be true: 99% of people are fucking exhausted. The problem is so bad that people feel they have to fly to a different continent to get away from everything, but often return with even less energy due to the unpredictable stresses of travel.
But if you’re watching this video, you’ve probably considered mindfulness as a potential solution. Maybe you’ve heard that calming your mind and being present can help you manage your energy better. In a way, you’re right, but there’s a problem:
How do you practice mindfulness when you’re already tired?
I received a question on this from a viewer this morning:
Anwara said that sometimes their mindfulness is not on point and they experience a delay in recognizing that. And that this usually occurs when they’ve had less sleep or are tired.
I struggled with this myself for years. But later I discovered that my struggle was due to a misunderstanding of what mindfulness is really about…
If you’re like I was back then, mindfulness, for you, is about changing something:
- Changing bad thoughts to good thoughts
- Changing bad feelings to good feelings
- Changing confusion to clarity
The problem with this way of practising is that it’s relative. And as long as your peace depends on something being a certain way—whether it’s your body or your mind or your unreasonable boss—you’re fucked. Because in the relative world, things are always changing, often in spite of your efforts to shape them to your liking. Even if you could arrange the perfect circumstances for yourself for your entire life—perfect home, perfect partner, perfect work—you yourself would eventually undergo the ultimate change (death) and you’d have to watch it all fade. And if you’re attached to those perfect things you’ve arranged—which you will be considering how much work they would take—your death will not be at all pleasant.
Now, when we come to spiritual practice, we often boast that we’ve transcended all that. We talk about worldly efforts and spiritual efforts as if they’re different. This is a trap. As long as you hold the slightest demand that things be one way and not another—whether those things are ‘outer’ or ‘inner’—you will never be free.
Some meditators spend decades training their mind into a state of perfect calmness and equanimity, only to find their peace disrupted when they’re hit by some catastrophe. They’re taken totally by surprise, and are forced to admit that their peace was conditional. For example, it depended on them doing a certain amount of sitting practice or having a certain amount of quiet or being in a place that supported their practice. I’m not suggesting that these things are bad. I recommend that people use everything they can to support their practice and realization. But what I will always tell practitioners is that depending on anything—even stuff that’s described as ‘spiritual’—is a trap.
I share this Ram Dass quote often: ‘do you want to be a meditator or do you want to be free?’ He’s not suggesting that we don’t meditate. He’s suggesting that we meditate with proper understanding—which is that meditation is one of many tools, designed for the purpose of realizing freedom.
I use the word ‘realizing’, here, very deliberately. Because the truth is, you’re already free. You cannot make yourself free because you always were free. This is what is to be recognized through mindfulness, and it has nothing to do with whether or not you’re tired.
If you’re like I was in the middle stages of my practice, you think mindfulness is about being in a certain state. You feel that when your mind is clear and calm, you’re practising correctly, and when your mind is dull or chaotic, you’re practising incorrectly.
Clarity and calmness can be brought about by deliberately training the mind, and this is an excellent thing to do. In relative terms, it’s far superior to getting drunk or letting a video game take over your life—because it’s simply more beneficial, both to yourself and to those around you. But in absolute terms, it’s still a trap because you’re saying ‘I don’t like the mind when it’s dull; I want the mind to be different’. It’s still rooted in dissatisfaction, which is the basic problem of being human—the problem mindfulness is all about solving.
So what do we do instead? We still employ mindfulness, but not for changing anything. We employ it, instead, for simple recognition.
Recognition of what?
Recognition of our true nature as the aware basic space in which the sensations of tiredness—of all experience—come and go.
How do you know you’re tired when you’re tired? You know because you’re aware. And that awareness is always perfectly lucid and clear, regardless of what occurs ‘within’ it. You do not have to be well-slept to be aware. If you think you do, your defiition of who you are is too narrow. It’s as if you’re holding your right hand up to your face and insisting your other limbs don’t exist—only on a much greater scale.
What you need to do is, in a way of speaking, ‘zoom out’. Observe that cocktail of sensations you call ‘tiredness’, just as it is. Recognize that they come and go and, therefore, cannot be ‘you’. You are the aware, pure space in which, by which, as which, through which these sensations—and all others—are known.
Recognizing this is what mindfulness is really about. Now, some practitioners find this ‘zooming out’ to be inaccessible at first. They’re so identified with the body, the mind, the feelings that they can’t see the context in which they appear. And that’s okay. Deliberate, relativistic mindfulness practices are excellent prescriptions in this case. BUT for that practitioner to have a chance at true freedom, these prescriptions must be undertaken in the broader context I’ve outlined in this teaching.
If you think that by engaging in spiritual practice you’re somehow racking up ‘enlightenment points’ you’re going to be disappointed.
Deliberate practices are provisional. They are tools to be used for one simple purpose: helping the practitioner to let go of their interpretations of reality and see it, instead, as it really is. Once this recognition is made, deliberate practices can be renounced. The practitioner realizes that they always were free—they were just believing otherwise. The practitioner ceases to be a practitioner at all; ceases to identify as anything at all, and relaxes into natural meditative stability. From here, the notion that anything could be done to create or enhance that stability is seen to be absurd.
Beware, though, we mustn’t rush this. If all you can do to slow the tide of mental chaos is repeat a mantra like your life depends on it, then that is your practice. If you need formal sitting practice to experience any degree of calmness, then sitting practice is the wise thing to do. But as you engage in these practices ‘leave the door open’ for the kind of recognition I’ve illustrated here.
Some practitioners hear this teaching—the teaching of nonduality—and abandon their practices too soon. This is a great error. The wise practitioner experiments; the wise practitioner investigates. What happens when you look at the context in which tiredness arises? Can you recognize your nature as the space in which it occurs? If so, keep recognizing! If not, splash some water on your face.
With love from my sofa,
dg💙
P.S. If you want to know where you’re at in your mindfulness journey, take my 1-minute quiz.
~
NSC Fatigue Survey Report:
https://www.nsc.org/getmedia/5a0a7e87-9170-41a0-b28c-ce7b6ef3fc7e/fatigue-survey-report.pdf
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